Me ,myself and I are contained in a bag of skin called Jim. We talk to one another regularly about the direction the bag is going, and generally what it is all about, and what is best for it. We know the bag hears us because it often mouths our dialogue and we hear ourselves repeated, though not always accurately. Those of our trio never try to dominate or take over and we simply laugh off the little foibles we see from time to time  that drive the bag to go off in somewhat hapless directions.
     Jim, who is easily mystified, says,  "Who are these entities that claim to be me, or that try to direct me in my life?  Are they Angels or Demons, or just Gods or Muses?  Do they arise from an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato?' ----As Scrooge purportedly said to the ghost of Jacob Marley.
      We reflected that the three of us were becoming more obvious to Jim as he is ageing and a bag has to listen more intently to his inner life. In addition, Me, Myself and I are probably stirring up the bag a little more often.
        Jim finally asked,  "Who are you guys anyway?"  We, as a trio, answered in unison.  We have rehearsed this answer many times as we have always been here in the bag of skin called Jim and have waited for the question which has finally come.----- "Jim, we are much older than you and have been here many years before you. You, for your information, are a new bag and always will be since the elements of your cellular replacements for every one of your current cells arrives from earth's supplies every few weeks or months as you reconstruct the skin of your bag and renew the cellular contents within with fresh materials. For that reason, though your template remains old and is getting older, you become a new cellular entity each week or two as earth recycles its materials to and fro. Even your wet bones will rise again and be renewed, though much more slowly. You are and will be the paradox of new cells from earth in the template of an old bag.
       "To answer your question, We just are! You however are of earth. You are no more mad than anyone else. Not more;  not less. You are just listening to us more carefully and somewhat more urgently now!"

I bought a print an other year of the Camino, the road from France to the Spanish town of Santiago de Compostela. It was in an exhibition series of pictures in our library exploring the nature of roads. Standing on the road;  a trail really;  was a solitary lengthened shadow of a pilgrim holding a stick:  the low sun, the sense of impending twilight, and the antiqued paper giving the print of the road  a quality of roughness and endless distance. A road always suggests a journey : leaving somewhere, or something, or someone and going to something or somewhere.  But the gist of the journey is the process, not the beginning,  nor the end,  but where we will spend ourselves. The shadow is fully in contact with the road and accompanies the traveler forward and backward during the day, leading and following and foreshortened side by side.
     The road, hard and rough, the traveler footsore:  he is confined by the direction of the roadway if he is to progress to his intended target. If it's the road to Zanzibar Dorothy Lamour takes with her friends, or the ´Yellow Brick Road, or the Camino road, the road is where you will spend yourself. This is where we walk a step at a time. In my print the solitary figure expressed by the shadow and the stick gives a feeling to the viewer of the loneliness of the roadway. There is no Bing Crosby or Bob Hope to accompany Dorothy! There is no Toto to accompany the other Dorothy. But of course some of these are only fantasies. Road may signify action not meaning  in a world without metaphor.
      In my print there is no bicycle, no automobile, just a trail where each step is the only present and the only reality. My print could have been from anywhere because my road is a metaphor for life. I have never taken the road  to Santiago de Compostela, marking the way to the Cathedral of St. James, and I am too old to do it now, but a road, is a road, is a road and we are all on a roadway to somewhere and leaving somewhere. It is the process that we live with from the road we decided to take, rather than a goal that will be arrived at somewhere else.  Think about it for a minute.  How many times did you start with a goal and find during the journey, from your roadway, that the real purpose was somewhere else? And how slow and painful it had to be to get there.

March 17th:  I was buzzed by the bumble bee today.  And we counted 14 Harbour seals clustered together, four of them circling about, and ten treading , or what goes for treading, vertically in the water, sharp little snouts looking skyward; all waiting for the spawning herring to appear. The Indian Plum is in full flower and the Alder catkins are a cloud of red-brown. The Bufflehead ducks are weaving in and out of the cluster of waiting seals and taking their share of the small minnows the seals ignore. The raspberries and the loganberries have just started to leaf and the rhubarb is poking up through the leaf mold. The gooseberries and black currents are leafing ahead of the red currents.The apple trees don't show any green buds yet but the pear trees flower buds are swelling with life but not yet bursting with colour.
    The late storm surges over the last few days have thrown up an abundance of seaweed and have sucked out a lot of loose winter vegetation dropped from the shore shrubs. This detritus has mixed together and harbours all the tiny denizens of the shore that feed the gulls and crows. The ground of the seaside is like a wet sponge with all the rain and the moss is especially thick this spring giving a yellow-green luminosity to the canvas of Mother Nature lying supine before us in the sunlight. The little red squirrel scampered about today and he (or she) allowed me to approach to three or four feet which is pretty bold. They are quick but not quick enough and I always worry about the eagles which are starting to hunt in earnest, feeding bigger fledglings.
     There is green,green,green every where on Lotus Island today and since St. Patrick was of the green it seems right. We haven't been diverted yet from the green by the vibrant colours that will come in abundance in another month. Even the daffodil blooms are still in the anteroom. However the greens are restful and as holy as Saint Patrick. A serene sort of vibrant. I think I'll toast the green with a glass of Black Bush right about now!

 My dad was a farm boy and the phrase "Kee Heep"  was used to call the cows. It was a singular throat sound. The shrieking and shrill "e" phonetic of kee heep carries a distance and was clearly pleasing to the recipient cows since it meant an event and they came ambling  back together.
    If one of us was at a distance and  dad wanted to get our attention he also hollered " kee heep". My dad was not a soft spoken man. If dad wanted to make himself available he always said, " Holler if you need me." It was not as if he was hard of hearing.  Holler, for him was both a figure of speech and a literal remedy. It was particularly useful in ball and hockey games, then generally ornamented with colorful phasing when disgusted with  the play.
     My dad always whistled while he worked as a younger man  and particularly as he rode his bicycle back and forth from his job. As he became older he stopped whistling while he worked but could still whistle a little if he sat and caught his breath a while. He stopped hollering and stopped calling at us, kee heep. You need breathe to holler . "kee heep" and to whistle. The cigarettes had finally caught up with him and he became progressively more disabled with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease or COPD. He remained cheerful but much quieter when confined eventually to his chair for much of the day anchored to the oxygen tank. The day before he fell and cracked his hip and two days before he died the oxygen man had visited him and wrote a progress note, "Mr W is doing well , and is cheerful in his slippers and doing the breakfast dishes.".
     Wellness is relative and finite.  He has been dead almost 40 years but I still think back to the hollering kee heep and the whistling merrily with the same monotonous tune as he rode back and forth to his job. My brothers remember  his regular tune  "Let me call you sweetheart, I'm in love with you". He rode the bicycle because he never had a car in those days. You could always tell where he was coming from or going from a long way off. His sounds were still part of us for a very long time.

The top drawer of my dresser is the lowly sock drawer. The socks have to share the drawer with old matchbooks, loose change, single cuff links and other untoward paraphernalia. Socks are one of the more     underrated items of apparel. In most cases they are only glimpsed unless you are in a kilt or plus fours and then they have become part of your statement. My father had a fetish about socks that drooped about the ankle and throughout his life he may have come to be the only man in the world who wore calf garters. My mother said to me years ago,  "It's getting harder and harder to find garters for dad. I went to Eatons yesterday and they only had two left in the warehouse. I bought both pairs. "
      Setting aside statement socks and calf garters,  the run of the mill socks could be described as foot underwear. They have no status with the average male though they may with the occasional sock fetishist. In the process of examining feet in the office for many years I found people were often reluctant to remove their socks.If they came with a problem with a single foot it was always necessary for me  to examine the other foot in comparison. I always asked them to remove the other sock to compare the feet. This provided some discomfiture to the occasional patient who had taken the precaution to wash only the problematic foot.
      I don't recall ever seeing memorable socks on any male because perhaps they are under the radar. I guess it's the fate of the unseen and unappreciated that they are neglected. Covered up by the shoe below and trouser leg above, and coping with sweaty feet, over long toenails,  stones in the shoe, projecting heel callouses and corns, hammer toe, fasciitis, steeped in athletes foot fungus, and constantly rubbed by old shoe leather! What a life of duress for the unloved. Damned by life shortening toe and heel holes. They are never darned in this day and age as I observe, though my mother darned socks in the olden days. When I was a student I tried to darn but ended up just sewing the edges together so the socks became too small. A useful alternative was to cut my toenails.
       At least my mother and I tried to care for what can truly be described as the down trodden!

Alice the first.
Alice Munro is the only Canadian with the exception of Saul Bellow, to win the Nobel prize for literature. She was described by the Swedes as " Master of the short story." Alice Munro reminds me of a forensic pathologist unearthing truth under each gravestone, and dissecting each bit of tissue she comes across. Her pathology reports gleam with the clarity of presentation. My new project is to study her collected works over time, but my colleagues are afraid I will become depressed from the reality she displays. I am unafraid because I relate to her inasmuch as she was a pretty, small town girl, unmoneyed, but with determination that amongst other things succeeded to win her the Nobel prize for literature. Who would not take advantage to a study of the wordsmith skill seen in the stories?  Who, Canadian, also unmoneyed, determined but not pretty, near her age and a small town boy wouldn't want to read her?
     My friend Fran, who reads fiction extensively says she has generally avoided Alice because the work is dark. I suppose in a sense all forensic pathology is dark but also embodies the interesting truth that the ordinary is so often extraordinary. I suppose in a sense all forensic study of humanity is dark but also embodies truth. As she writes she continues to exhume the troughs of her youth, seeking the answers in the flesh of what  is buried  that gives  rise to new feelings from old shadows. She respects her reader enough to permit their own resolution of her story within their own shadows. That is respect for your reader and invites engagement. That can't be depressing. It's therapeutic. It is however a writing scenario that doggedly and consistently records the faltering of humanity or the ordinary despair accepted that surrounds us.
     Classification of Alice's autopsy findings should be, Adult Only.
Alice the second.
I have an inkling however, that Alice Munro does not write of men who can have significant and lasting relationships with other men. Curiously , her capacity to examine relationships as a whole is so acute and perceptive, so why is this so mysterious? Her men appear to be either solitary or only connect to other men mediated primarily through their women. They often appear transient in their relationships. I must confess I have only read about fifty of her stories so far so I may be proven wrong in the end, but this is my early conclusion. I mean this as no criticism but merely the observation that the capacity of men to have warm, meaningful, lasting relationships with one another is not part of her purview. It may be that she does not have a deeper understanding of men. Is this in fact a characteristic of many women authors? I haven't given this much thought but I am going to.
      What she does clearly understand is her home country of her youth. Her portrayal of rural Ontario is so striking to me. She is about six years older than me but the descriptions of the small towns and mine on the prairies is so identical and so rich it is a goldmine of feeling.I am going to read all the rest of her stories; fettered men or otherwise.

The science of waste disposal in the olden days had a local flavor. As a young boy in Melfort I always had an intense interest in this art. When my brother Ken was born four years later I went from good to naughty but my interest in disposal was unchanged. We had a one holer in the back lane with a back flap on a hinge and a can under the hole to receive for disposal of the contents by the honeyman. As a five year old I remember vividly lifting the flap and inspecting  what seemed like a large buttock in the process of evacuation and tickling it with a piece of grass, eliciting howls of rage.
      As a young teenager we lived in Lestock in a  small town railway station that had a two holer over  a single pit. My chores at home included emptying the can in our indoor toilet room in the winter into the two holer. I remember it was important not to trip and fall as I carried the can down the stairs to the outhouse. I got twenty dollars a month from the CNR to  put lime into the pit from time to time and make sure that paper was available in the outhouse since  that two holer was for the station's public use. Since I was shy I couldn't conceive a twosome having a chat on my two holer in a relaxed way as they engaged their process.
       In the larger town we lived in, Kindersley, the science of disposal was much more professional and though our toilet was indoors with a can we had to put our can outside on the street for the honey man to collect in his horse drawn tank. In the winter he allowed a kid to hitch his sleigh on the back of the tank for a ride on the street because it wasn't too stinky at that time of the year. You had to be careful if he stopped too fast. There was no flushing away the end of our product, sight unseen, banished from reality, detached from our humanity like those blase folks in the city
          When your mother finally persuaded, cajoled or bribed you to produce a poop in the potty, this seminal event meant for you, a showering of approval, a sense of providing great pleasure for your parent and a newly found sense of esteem. It's no wonder that in the recesses of our adult mind the appearance of the bowel movement gives a certain guilty pleasure to the assessment  of the length, breadth and color. Our cranial software retains that old imprint of wonder at that childhood event and the pleasure principle reappears.I was often denied this pleasure since the two holer outhouse was dark and dank. Inspection was difficult.The scatological merriment that often occurs when matters like these are considered by some is pointedly males only. And some males pointedly. I guess so!
      There was a time in early medical history when detailed inspection of the  lowly poop was serious business and one of the few diagnostic tools available. Appearance, consistency, color and odor all entered the diagnostic armamentarium of the good physician. It became the 'ne plus ultra tool' then. Now tools are augmented by computer imaging, fiber optic colonoscopy and microbiology. Poopology may be still a fertile source however for psychological inquiry.

Our reading group was doing Hamlet when we came upon Osric, a stooge of the king, whom we concluded, among other faults, was a fop. We then branched into other contemporary examples of  "fophood"  we could cite. I then thought of other examples of Osric, later after the meeting, that I might have described to the group, one of which was me.
    Many years ago the pianist and I went to Maui for the first time of our lives. It seemed so splendid I believed I needed to dress for the occasion in a more appropriate way. I bought a chequered seerssucker jacket, sky blue and white, lemon yellow trousers. a matching woolen lemon yellow tie, white shirts, and blue and white saddle shoes to complement the jacket. I can't remember the socks but they would have been as memorable as the rest of my ensemble. I'm not blaming the salesman at the clothing store and I did blend in with the other gentleman at the time at the old Lahaina luau.
      When we returned to Victoria  and my first day back to work I thought to wear my Lahaina clothing and came to the hospital for rounds in the morning. I hasten to say that in those days in Medicine in the 60's everyone in practice wore the uniform, dark blue or grey suit, white shirt, drab tie without food on it,  black polished shoes, and the suit buttoned up.  I had no inkling of the singularity of my garb or the consternation it created given that day, that place and that era. Some whispered I was having a breakdown. My favorite surgical nurse said, " You look like a  dressed up Ukrainian."  Someone else asked, "What country's flag was the jacket?" Shortly after I retreated back to the house and from then on dressed in dark blue or grey. I wanted to belong. I didn't want to be a fop.
       Dressing  right I found, is like real estate, location, location, location!

My father's youngest brother, Edjerton, was 15 years old when his mother died and she was buried on Christmas day 1932. It was the height of the great depression and the dirty thirties  in the prairies and he was raised by his father and largely his sister and adult brothers. These were hard times on the prairie farms. He joined the Canadian army after schooling and was shipped to England as a corporal in the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division. He was part of the Dieppe raid on August 19, 1942 and was captured by the German army after 4 days inland. He was to remain a prisoner of war in Stalag 8b for the remainder of the war. I must have written to him when I was 8 years old because he wrote back to me thanking me for the carton of cigarettes and the chewing gum. I still have the letter with the censor stamp.
    When he was repatriated he tried a variety of jobs in the Okanagan where his sister and brother lived, but he was rootless. He became an alcoholic. He had a serious car accident when he was drinking and driving and his passenger was killed. He was convicted of manslaughter and jailed. He had other convictions later. Thoughout the time we knew our uncle he was sweet and kind to us, his nieces and nephews, and was always interested in us. There was a Jekyll and Hyde characteristic to him in retrospect.
     He eventually realized he couldn't cope with the "civilized world of the 60's" and he learned to cook and spent the rest of his life working in the mining camps of northern Alberta and the Yukon. He wrote to us at Christmas and more often to his sister. My father received a letter sometime in the 80's from a friend of my uncle in Edmonton who reported that He had been in hospital with TB and had died several weeks earlier. He left no possessions and had no issue. He had enough money to pay for his burial. His family had despaired of him and came to try to forget as much as they could. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder was not defined in my uncles time. Sadly, we were all black and white in those days and just wondered why they didn't " just get on with it? "
      Winston Churchill  wrote 4,987 pages in 6 volumes detailing the events of the 2nd world war. He only devoted 2 and one half pages to the Dieppe raid in his volume the Hinge of Fate. It was largely confined to his "good reasons" to proceed with the raid with primarily 6,000 Canadian troops. 3,367 were killed, wounded, or captured. He determined the raid was a success. Some success!

I had left home to go to university when my mother and dad moved to Vancouver from the prairies  with three other children to look after in the early fifties. My father was very short of income at the time with the new costs. He worked in the daytime as a telegrapher at the CNR station from 8 am to 5 pm, but to make ends meet he took another job.
    This is what he said in his Memoire. 
     "I worked in the Vancouver Herald for a time to supplement our income by selling subscriptions over the phone. About fifty sellers were in separate cubbyholes, and we were each given a sheet out of the phone book. You called each number with a sob story about paying for a crippled children's Easter bus and the like. You got 15 cents for each subscriptions you sold and the manager got 5 cents  each for all the subscriptions sold by the fifty cubbyhole occupants. The hours were 5 pm to 9 pm. I got home at 10 pm and ate. I caught the bus at 7 am the next morning to go to my regular job. I made 15 dollars a week selling subscriptions."
     Each time I read his story and every time I receive a telephone pitch from someone, I think of my dad, coping as best as he could at the time with a family and an income shortfall. I am ambivalent about boiler rooms and the hardships of telephone sales persons because of him. But we are called in this life to value connectedness and avoid judgment. We can't really say we are able to  walk in anyone else's shoes. I have to say to myself,  "Just shut up and do your best."